Those Who Are Made Can Be Unmade.

The More Facts I Can Have, The Better. I Can Operate Very Nicely Between Them, But I Am Not Very Good At Making Things Up. I Am Not Sure How Ethical It Is.

If I Am Feeling Broken, I Can Pick Up One Of [ivy Compton-burnett] Books And The Next Morning I Can Write Again. It Puts My Mechanism Back.

A Sea-green Sky: Lamps Blossoming White. This Is Marginal Land: Fields Of Strung Wire, Of Treadless Tyres In Ditches, Fridges Dead On Their Backs, And Starving Ponies Cropping The Mud. It Is A Landscape Running With Outcasts And Escapees, With Afghans, Turks And Kurds: With Scapegoats, Scarred With Bottle And Burn Marks, Limping From The Cities With Broken Ribs. The Life Forms Here Are Rejects, Or Anomalies: The Cats Tipped From Speeding Cars, And The Heathrow Sheep, Their Fleece Clotted With The Stench Of Aviation Fuel.

Fiction Isn't Made By Scraping The Bones Of Topicality For The Last Shreds And Sinews, To Be Processed Into Mechanically Recovered Prose. Like Journalism, It Deals In Ideas As Well As Facts, But Also In Metaphors, Symbols And Myths.

So Many Years Of Preparation, For What Was Called Adult Life: Was It For This?